Writing a fantasy story means making up an imaginary world where you decide on every detail.
You might decide to write about a beautiful world, inhabited by magical beings, where even the trees and rocks are full of secret, wondrous power. Or maybe your style is more dark and creepy, and you want to write about evil forces spreading destruction in a miserable, gloomy land. Then again, you could decide to follow your imagination to some surprising, weird places, and invent a bizarre setting, full of alien creatures unlike anything that has ever been imagined before. You could even do a bit of all those things!
Sometimes fantasy stories take place on distant planets or on planes of existence far from our own. But sometimes the imaginary world is hidden right inside our real world, and if you look down the right street, or into the right house, or through the right closet, you’ll catch a glimpse of it looking back at you.
No matter what sort of world you prefer, in a fantasy story everything is up to you. Nobody else can tell the writer what color the sky needs to be…or whether there is such thing as magic…or what kinds of creatures can live there. The writer decides on all those things.
In this book, we’re going to give you lots of ideas for how to create a fantasy world all your own and then start writing a story about it. Any kind of story can happen in a fantasy world: comedies, mysteries, love stories—anything you find interesting. If there’s a certain kind of story you want to write, go for it!
But many stories set in fantasy worlds are adventure stories. In an adventure story, you take that world you’ve made and plop something, or someone, dangerous right down into the middle of it. The world, and the people or creatures who live there, are in great peril! A hero needs to appear and go on a dangerous quest to set things in the world right again.
Writing a fantasy adventure story is lots of fun, and lets you take your imagination to some wild places, as you invent magical items, monsters, villains, terrifying dungeons, and all sorts of other wonders and dangers for your hero to confront. Like other stories, it usually has a beginning, middle, and end and goes something like this:
The Beginning: The World
We learn about a fantasy world, meet some of the characters who live there, and find out about a big problem.
The Middle: The Quest
A hero goes on a quest, or adventure, in order to solve the problem.
The End: The Return
The hero completes the quest and solves the problem (or fails to solve it).
In the pages that follow, we’re going to give you lots of tips and activities to help you create your own world and send a hero on a big adventure to save it. But the most important thing to remember is that writing a fantasy story is all about getting to do what YOU want. If you want to write something different from what we’re suggesting, do it! We’re just here to give you some ideas. The story you tell is all up to you.